The need for communications among computer systems is spurring advancement in several key technology areas including networking and messaging. As technology industries grow, the number and type of available computer systems grows in proportion. Parallel development of a multitude of computer system standards, platforms, and operating systems poses challenges to inter-system communications. Until recently, sophisticated and often expensive conversion programs were needed to achieve inter-communicability. However, the advent of messaging and queueing systems has made communications across distributed and often disparate systems a viable and economical reality.
Messaging software provides an interface between applications, allowing them to send data back and forth to each other asynchronously. Data sent by one is stored in a queue and then retrieved by a receiving program when the receiving program becomes available to process the message. In accordance with message queueing implementations such as IBM Websphere MQseries®, a messaging application known as a queue manager interprets certain events or conditions as indicating that an action or response is warranted. Such an event or condition is known as a trigger event. When a trigger event occurs, the queue manager sends a trigger message to a second queue referred to as an initiation queue indicating that a trigger event has occurred. A trigger message can be generated for a queue every time a message arrives on the queue, when the first message arrives on the queue, or when the number of messages on the queue reaches a predefined number. A first application can request that the placement of any message on a local queue associated with the first application be interpreted as a trigger event. Generally, a trigger message indicates that a trigger event occurred and may also include additional information related to the trigger event. A second messaging application known as a trigger manager monitors the initiation queue, retrieves trigger messages placed on the initiation queue, creates a task (invokes a second application), and passes the trigger messages to the second application.
A consequence of such an architecture is that where the trigger manager is not executing, the second application is not invoked and trigger messages are not received by the second application. In addition, the time required to complete the entire trigger process for multiple triggers is extended where trigger messages are placed on the initiation queue faster than the trigger manager is able to retrieve them and pass them to the second application. Such is the case in high performance systems and high transaction-rate systems. An embodiment of the present invention provides for an efficient system and method for message queue triggering.